There are advances being made almost daily in the disciplines required to make space and its contents accessible.
This blog brings together a lot of that info, as it is reported, tracking the small steps into space that will make it just another place we carry out normal human economic, leisure and living activities.

Tuesday, 9 May 2017

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Sometimes a brown dwarf is actually a planet -- or planet-like anyway. A team discovered that what astronomers had previously thought was one of the closest brown dwarfs to our own Sun is in fact a planetary mass object.
via Science DailyZazzle Space Exploration market place

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A kinesiology study has found that astronauts aboard the International Space Station have decreased physical fitness because of a decrease in the way oxygen moves through the body.
via Science DailyZazzle Space Exploration market place

Graphenea CEO Jesus de la Fuente was selected by Forbes magazine among the top 100 most creative business individuals of 2017! Forbes notes on their website that "in 2010 Jesus founded Graphenea, a company dedicated to the industrial production of graphene". "Graphene is two hundred times stronger than steel, superconducting, super light and superflexible, all at a thickness of an atom!", the magazine exclaims. The potential applications of graphene higlighted by Forbes are in electronics, energy storage and the world of polymers.

Before founding Graphenea, Jesus served as a Manager in Arthur Andersen, Director in Pricewaterhouse Coopers in the advisory professional services, and Managing Director in an industrial materials distribution private company. He holds an Engineering B.S. from Deusto University and an Executive MBA from IESE Business School.

more » Do you see it? This common question frequently precedes the rediscovery of one of the most commonly recognized configurations of stars on the northern sky: the Big Dipper. This grouping of stars is one of the few things that has likely been seen, and will be seen, by every generation. The Big Dipper is not by itself a constellation. Although part of the constellation of the Great Bear (Ursa Major), the Big Dipper is an asterism that has been known by different names to different societies. Five of the Big Dipper stars are actually near each other in space and were likely formed at nearly the same time. Connecting two stars in the far part of the Big Dipper will lead one to Polaris, the North Star, which is part of the Little Dipper. Relative stellar motions will cause the Big Dipper to slowly change its configuration over the next 100,000 years. Pictured in late April, the Big Dipper was actually imaged twice -- above and below distant Chilean volcanoes, the later reflected from an unusually calm lagoon.

At a ceremony today, CERN inaugurated its linear accelerator, Linac 4, the newest accelerator acquisition since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Linac 4 is due to feed the CERN accelerator complex with particle beams of higher energy, which will allow the LHC to reach higher luminosity by 2021. After an extensive testing period, Linac 4 will be connected to CERN’s accelerator complex during the upcoming long technical shut down in 2019-20. Linac 4 will replace Linac 2, which has been in service since 1978. It will become the first step in CERN’s accelerator chain, delivering proton beams to a wide range of experiments.

“We are delighted to celebrate this remarkable accomplishment. Linac 4 is a modern injector and the first key element of our ambitious upgrade programme, leading up to the High-Luminosity LHC. This high-luminosity phase will considerably increase the potential of the LHC experiments for discovering new physics and measuring the properties of the Higgs particle in more detail,” said CERN Director General, Fabiola Gianotti.

“This is an achievement not only for CERN, but also for the partners from many countries who contributed to designing and building this new machine,” said CERN Director for Accelerators and Technology, Frédérick Bordry. “Today, we also celebrate and thank the wide international collaboration that led this project, demonstrating once again what can be accomplished by bringing together the efforts of many nations.”

The linear accelerator is the first essential element of an accelerator chain. In the linear accelerator, the particles are produced and receive the initial acceleration; the density and intensity of the particle beams are also shaped in the linac. Linac 4 is an almost 90-metre-long machine sitting 12 metres below the ground. It took nearly 10 years to build.

Linac 4 will send negative hydrogen ions, consisting of a hydrogen atom with two electrons, to CERN’s Proton Synchrotron Booster (PSB), which further accelerates the negative ions and removes the electrons. Linac 4 will bring the beam up to 160 MeV energy, more than three times the energy of its predecessor. The increase in energy, together with the use of hydrogen ions, will enable double the beam intensity to be delivered to the LHC, thus contributing to an increase in the luminosity of the LHC.

Luminosity is a parameter indicating the number of particles colliding within a defined amount of time. The peak luminosity of the LHC is planned to be increased by a factor of five by 2025. This will make it possible for the experiments to accumulate about 10 times more data over the period 2025 to 2035 than before. The High-Luminosity LHC will therefore provide more accurate measurements of fundamental particles than today, as well as the possibility of observing rare processes that occur beyond the machine’s present sensitivity level.

via CERN: Updates for the general public
http://home.cern/about/updates/2017/05/brand-new-linear-accelerator-cern

You'll also find a selection of great gifts with an astronomy / space theme - from phone and iPad cases to posters, clocks, greetings cards, necklaces and mugs. Many are personalizable and all are customizable - click any to try before you buy!